What Your Resume Should Look Like in 2016

“In today’s job market, your resume needs to immediately stand out,” says Dawn Bugni, a professional resume writer in Wilmington, N.C. Attention spans are at an all-time short, with hiring managers spending just six seconds looking at a resume before deciding whether the applicant is worth further consideration, a recent study by TheLadders found. (That’s if a human looks at it at all; before your application even reaches a hiring manager, it usually has to make it past an automated applicant tracking system.)

As hiring continues to increase, job seekers will face stiff competition this year. Follow the tips below to make your resume shine in 2016.

Put simply: hiring managers are busy; make their job easier by hyperlinking your email address so that you’re only one click away, says Wendy Enelow, co-author of Modernize Your Resume: Get Noticed…Get Hired. Bear in mind that you expose yourself to identify theft if you include your full mailing address, says Enelow, so only put your city, state, and zip code on your resume. Also, use active links to your LinkedIn profile and any other social media accounts that are fit for recruiters.

2. Make the page “pop.”

Depending on the industry, you can distinguish your resume by punching up the design, but exercise caution: a graphic artist, for example, has more creative leeway than an accountant.

Enelow’s co-author Louise Kursmark recommends using color to make your resume unique. To stay professional, consider making only section headers blue, for example, and leaving the rest in black, Kursmark suggests. And replace the outdated Times New Roman with a more modern font such as Cambria, Calibri, or Georgia, Enelow says. (As standard typefaces, they translate well between operating systems.)

3. Ditch the objective statement…

Today’s hiring managers aren’t concerned with what is it you’re looking for—they’re focused on finding the right hire. Thus, “the objective statement has become obsolete,” says Tiffani Murray, an HR professional and resume writer at Atlanta-based Personality On a Page.

…and lead with a summary.

To capture the hiring manager’s attention, start your resume with a short professional synopsis that states your years of experience, job history, and big career achievements. Instead of labeling the section a “summary,” use the header to highlight your area of expertise, says Enelow.

For more on careers, watch this Fortune video:

4. Guide the reader’s eye.

The Internet has changed reading behavior, says Kursmark: “People don’t read top to bottom anymore. They’re constantly skimming and looking at different parts of the page, and if you don’t structure your resume to appeal to that, a lot of good material will get overlooked.” Therefore, use bolded text to ensure your achievements stand out.

5. Beat the robots.

Many medium and large companies use software to weed out candidates. Your resume will need the right keywords to get through, so mirror the language of the job posting, advises Bugni, and pay attention to detail. “Changing something as simple as ‘customer service’ to ‘client relations’ can get your resume approved or rejected,” she says.

6. Forgo a “skills” section.

Weave your talents into your work experience. “Employers are looking for more than a list of skills,” says Murray. “They want to know how you’ve applied them.” The exception: It’s beneficial to have a designated section when applying for a skills-based job that requires specific qualifications, such as an IT specialist.

7. Maximize your real estate.

Despite what you may have heard, you don’t necessarily need to limit your resume to one page. “A resume is as long as it needs to be to convey value. And not one word more,” says Bugni. That said, a two-page resume may be appropriate for someone with 30 years’ experience—not for a recent college graduate. To conserve space use bullet points, active verbs, and industry-specific acronyms, and don’t state the obvious (e.g., including “references available upon request”).

Job hunting? 5 ways to outshine the competition

A downturn keeps people in jobs they’ve outgrown (or never liked much in the first place). Then the economy revives, and the job market looks like a giant game of musical chairs, with all the players scrambling to find their next seat. This time, the “jobless recovery” having been longer and grimmer than usual, the pent-up demand is stunning.

Consider: No fewer than 80% of all U.S. employees are either actively job hunting now or are open to offers, surveys say. Only 5% intend to stick around in their current positions until the end of 2015, reports a new poll from Right Management.

Numbers like that are a wake-up call for companies that want to hold on to their best talent — but also for employees itching to move. Everyone now has to try harder than ever “to differentiate themselves and demonstrate why they would be the best hires,” notes Patty Prosser, CEO of talent development and HR consulting firm OI Global Partners.

The firm recently asked its career consultants which tactics are working best for job seekers right now. Here’s what they said, and the percentage of coaches who recommended each step:

Customize communications with each employer (80%). This doesn’t mean continually rewriting your resume, Prosser says, which is “not only time-consuming but causes confusion for job hunters trying to recall which resume they sent to whom.” Instead, use the right keywords on each application, if there is one, so that digital applicant tracking systems can spot them. Cover letters should mention specific qualifications each employer is looking for, and should include the hiring manager’s name.

Be ready to explain how your experience would fit into the new role (78%). “It’s sometimes difficult for prospective employers to interpret how your skills from past and present jobs would deliver the results they want,” notes Prosser. “Don’t expect an interviewer to do it.” Spell out as clearly as you can how your qualifications will transfer to the job you’re after, including an example or two of past achievements that relate to the new job.

Make sure your social media profiles have searchable keywords (65%). Prosser points out that about 8 out of 10 recruiters use LinkedIn to search for candidates, so you need to make sure they can find you. “Review the LinkedIn profiles of others in your field, and advertised job descriptions, to capture frequently used ‘buzz words,’” she suggests. “Tweeting and blogging on industry-related topics can help make you more visible online, too.”

Have as many face-to-face networking and informational meetings as you can (60%). To tap into the so-called hidden job market of openings that are never advertised anywhere, Prosser says in-person meetings are a must. “Stay away from emailing networking contacts,” she advises. “It’s quicker and easier, but it takes away the personal touch” that could get you hired.

Only pursue jobs for which you have at least 75% of the stated qualifications (58%). One of HR departments’ biggest pet peeves is the candidate who, having decided he or she wants to work at a given company, bombards the place with applications and resumes for every job opening, regardless of whether there’s a fit. Don’t waste their time — or yours. “Electronic screening could weed out unqualified applicants before a person ever sees the resume,” Prosser notes. Besides, she adds, “without at least 75% of the stated qualifications, it’s more than likely there will be lots of other candidates who are a better match for the job.”

Hiding your race or gender on a job application: Is it ever worth it?

These days, job hunters are looking for any advantage they can find. And research has shown that resumes with identical credentials lead to calls for interviews at a much higher rate when they appear to come from a white man, as opposed to having a name that “sounds” black, Hispanic, Asian, or female.

So if you’re a job seeker, should you consider shortening or even changing your name on a resume to raise your odds of getting past the screening stage and landing an interview? Such changes often lead job candidates down a slippery path and often yield more problems than solutions.

Nevertheless, women named Samantha or Alexandra might be tempted to use nicknames like Sam and Alex on their resumes. If your last name is Subramanium, you might wonder whether you’d have more success as a Smith. To be sure, American history is riddled with examples of immigrants who changed their last names to hide a heritage that would have subjected them to discrimination.

“I understand why job seekers that are minority or female would want to do that; it makes perfect sense based on what we know about the hiring process,” says Steve McDonald, an associate professor of sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “I’ve talked to folks that won’t put pictures up for their LinkedIn profile because of these concerns, especially because of race.”

Confronting hidden biases

One oft-cited research study found that resumes sent in response to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago from people with white-sounding names received 50% more callbacks for interviews than resumes with identical qualifications but came from people with names that sounded black. A similarly structured study looking just at academic science jobs found that application materials from female candidates received lower rankings and lower starting salaries than male candidates, even when a job application reviewer was female.

These and other studies reveal the prevalence of what’s called implicit bias, a scenario in which people screening resumes don’t realize they are stereotyping non-white and non-male job candidates as less qualified. Harvard academics have created an implicit association test that you can take to see if you harbor these kinds of biases. Indeed, psychologists say that most people hold unconscious stereotypes and biases because our brains rely on these cognitive shortcuts to navigate everyday life. The key is to prevent those unconscious beliefs from influencing our actions, which could lead to discriminatory behavior.

Because of this, people who fall into a gender, racial, or ethnic group that is likely to experience negative bias have found that downplaying that association can help them sidestep discrimination, behavior known as “covering.” A Deloitte research study found that 83% of lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals, 79% of black people, 66% of women, and 63 % of Hispanics covered in some way to conform to mainstream corporate culture. Covering, in this case, includes altering your appearance, limiting conversation topics, or changing your behavior.

When Carter Wall was a young investment banker, her boss advised that she remove her membership in a women’s forum from her resume. “I hadn’t realized that it was the only thing on my resume that pointed out I was a woman,” recalls Wall, 53, managing director at Franklin Beach Energy, a solar asset advisory consultancy based in Boston. “From my name, everybody would’ve assumed I was a guy.”

Craig McLeod, a 40-something African American software developer based in Dallas, negotiates everything from mortgages to car purchases over the phone, to help reduce the possibility of race being an issue. He says that his father told him stories of arranging a job interview by phone but showing up to be told, “you’ve got to get out of here.”

Corwin Stone, 41, an associate creative director for a software company in Dallas, knows that doors open to him because people assume he’s white based on his name. (He’s African American.) “When I’m talking, I don’t sound like a black guy, so it has helped me numerous times,” Stone says.

But it has also led to sticky situations. In the early 2000s, when he was working as a freelance designer in San Francisco, he was referred to potential new clients who happened to be white females. They spoke by phone several times about the project and arranged a meeting time, but when he showed up at their door, they appeared dumbfounded and asked how they could help him.

“Not only did we have an appointment, I just buzzed them and said it was Corwin downstairs,” he recalls. “They were so uncomfortable that I was in their house. I never got a call back after that meeting.”

Mary Ward, 40, has gotten used to the stunned looks when she appears at a conference or job interview. The half Hungarian, half Korean federal employee took her husband’s last name when they married, leaving behind her maiden name Csontos. In one encounter, a hiring manager asked, “Are you sure?” when she answered to the name Mary Ward. “You don’t look like a Mary Ward,” the manager said, and proceeded to quiz Ward on where she was born and where she lives now. “It was very awkward,” she says.

The costs of “covering”

Indeed, before you change Malik to Mike on your resume, consider the potential downside. If you downplay your minority identity, you’re running the risk of joining an organization with a culture of racism, sexism, elitism, or simply one in which you can’t be your authentic self.

“If you’re a job seeker, read the sector, read the organization that’s hiring you or you want to be hired by. If it looks like the covering demand is going to be placed on you, make the decision,” says Deloitte study co-author Kenji Yoshino, a law professor at New York University and author of Covering: the Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. “You’re in for a penny, in for a pound.”

Like McDonald, Yoshino says that he understands and doesn’t criticize a member of a minority group for making the decision to cover up a stigmatized identity. But he says that he often tells gay students that if they out themselves on their resumes, they will reduce their chances of being hired by a homophobic firm and potentially suffering because of it.

Individual respondents in the Deloitte study reported regret that they didn’t interview with more authenticity. For instance, black women who straightened their hair to fit the dominant culture in a corporation later felt constrained if they wanted to go natural.

As much as equality movements have improved matters for racial minorities, women, and LGBT employees, the burden often rests on these individuals to manage their identity within the dominant culture. “I feel like I have a responsibility every day to make the world comfortable with the fact that black men and black women are viable candidates,” Corwin says.

Wall recalls pushing back against the senior executive who thought she’d be better off with a resume that appeared male. “All of a sudden, I realized that he saw it as a disadvantage that I was a woman. I was a member of his team and he saw it as a handicap,” she says. She refused to take the women’s forum reference off her resume. But within a year, she left the firm.

Saving the world just got easier

Imagine trying to get a job with an outfit that demanded you fill out a 60-page application (yes, 60 pages), gave you no choice about what your duties would be or where you’d be working, and kept you waiting for more than a year to find out if you’d been hired or not. Oh, and one more thing: You’d be sent to one of the poorest parts of the world for two years and paid a stipend that would match your standard of living to that of the average local citizen, but not a penny more.

Sounds like a pretty dubious career move, doesn’t it?

Carrie Hessler-Radelet, who took over last month as head of the Peace Corps, thought so, too. “The Peace Corps is a great brand, but we really needed to bring it into the 21st century,” she says. “We’re a great place for Millennials to start a career, and the changes we’ve made will help.”

Not a second too soon: Applications to the organization dropped last year to their lowest level in its 50-year history, declining 34% from a 2009 peak of 15,384. The lengthy application form was clearly part of the problem: In the past nine months alone, more than 30,000 people gave up before getting through all 60 pages.

Hessler-Radelet, a Peace Corps alumna (she taught at a girls school in Western Samoa in the early 1980s), has whittled that daunting process down to its essentials. The new application can be filled out on the Peace Corps’ website in about an hour.

“We accept resumes now, and get a lot of information from those instead of from the old long, detailed questionnaire,” she explains. “There’s one essay question instead of two. And we used to require college transcripts from everyone, because certain countries require them. Now, we ask for transcripts only from people who have applied to work in those countries.”

Giving people a say in where they go, and a choice of what they’d like to do when they get there, is new, too. The website now lists and describes openings at all Peace Corps programs, from teaching to health care to land management, in some 65 countries. Applicants can browse opportunities, much as they would on any job posting site, and pick the ones that match their interests or their long-term career plans.

Each opening also includes two new deadlines, “Apply by” and “Know by,” so would-be volunteers who apply on time can see exactly when they’ll hear back. Instead of being left hanging for a year or more, which used to oblige people to put the rest of their lives on hold, applicants are now guaranteed an answer by a specific date.

Peace Corps volunteers still get paid a cost-of-living stipend that’s usually pretty modest, but they also leave after two years with a cash payout of $7,500. “Not many private-sector employers will hand you a check when you move on to your next job,” Hessler-Redelet notes. “It eases the transition.”

What the Peace Corps seeks in candidates hasn’t changed, either. “We don’t look for particular skills, because we can teach you whatever you need to know,” Hessler-Radelet says. “Our 10-week training program can turn, say, an English major into an economic development specialist. What we’re really after is the right attitude.”

And what might that be? “Our volunteers are really entrepreneurial and able to think on their feet. It helps to be resilient and flexible, and willing to understand other cultures,” she says. “As business gets more and more global, this can be great preparation for the international job market, or for analyzing emerging markets or managing multicultural teams in the U.S. It’s not easy, but it’s an experience that would be tough for someone just starting out to get in any other way.”

A stint in the Peace Corps is also increasingly popular with people at the other end of their careers. “Some of our most wonderful volunteers are people who have retired from the corporate world and are looking for an ‘encore career’ that really makes a difference,” says Hessler-Radelet. “Last year, our oldest volunteer was 80.”

Wd u rite a resume like this?

It was bound to happen, now that millions of us are merrily texting and tweeting away. Job interviewers have become more tolerant of spelling mistakes and other errors on resumes than they used to be.

Consider: Only about 17% of hiring managers say they would toss a resume in the circular file if it had a single snafu in it, according to a new poll from staffing firm Accountemps. That’s a sharp drop from 40% who said they would five years ago, and 47% who said so in 2006. Some managers really don’t care whether you can spell or not. More than a quarter (27%) said they’d overlook three mistakes, up from just 7% five years ago.

Even so, it’s smart to proofread your CV carefully, or have a friend who’s a stickler for spelling take a look at it. Almost two-thirds (64%) of the hiring managers polled said they’d look askance at a candidate who let even a single mistake slip through.

“Attention to detail is required for most jobs, and a resume should showcase this skill, not detract from it,” notes Accountemps Chairman Max Messmer. He blames “the quick and casual nature of communication today” for the recent rise in resume blunders like these:

“My last employer fried me for no reason.”

“I am graduating this Maybe.”

“I am looking for my big brake.”

“Referees available upon request.”

“My talent will be very a parent when you see me work.”

“Objective: To accell in the accounting industry.”

“My 3 biggest hobbies are cars, golf, racquetball, and reading.”

“Work experience: Academic tudor.”

“Earned a diploma from a very repudiated college.”

“Looking for a bass salary of $40,000.”

“Studied public rations.”

“No professional experience, but I have paid my do’s.”

“Bare me in mind for in-depth research projects.”

Ouch. While you’re double-checking for spelling, another recent Accountemps poll suggests that you rethink any “creative” job titles listed on your resume. Here’s a sampling of some that have made hiring managers cringe:

Certified Zen Master of Web Programming

Account manager/Steady Eddie of the office

Technological Teddy Bear

The Idea Wizard

Energetic Agent of Change

Customer Service Magician

High-level bean counter

Design ninja

These come across as “more amateurish than clever,” the study says, but there’s an even more compelling reason to avoid them. Non-traditional titles usually can’t be recognized by searchable databases or by software that screens candidates and matches them to job openings. So a “creative” title, intended to grab employers’ attention, is likely to make you invisible instead.